Black Emanuelle UK quad

Just a little something I picked up on Ebay:



Note how it does not actually mention Laura Gemser, in contrast to later films in the series she appeared in.

Emanuelle – Perché violenza alle donne? / Emanuelle Around the World / Confessions of Emanuelle / The Degradation of Emanuelle

Like a number of the unofficial Emanuelle series, distinguished from the originals by the one M spelling of the character's name, this is known by a confusing plethora of titles, not all of which directly relate to translations of the original Italian, in this case Emanuelle – Perché violenza alle donne? or Emanuelle – why is there violence against women?

Admittedly it’s not the most alluring of titles, especially given the target audience demographic: Emanuelle Around the World, Confessions of Emanuelle and The Degradation of Emanuelle – as were used in various territories – were probably more appealing than something that sounded perilously close to being a feminist tract rather than an exploitation movie.

Then again one of the constants of the Black Emanuelle series is their particular exploitative take on feminism: What sort of red-blooded (i.e. heterosexual) male couldn’t love the character’s liberated ideology of guilt and consequence free casual sex any time, any place, any where with pretty much anyone who asks, male or female? Isn’t it post-feminism avant la lettre?

Story wise the film is, as one perceptive IMDB reviewer remarks, basically Emanuelle in America lite.

That is, it’s again an episodic narrative travelogue that gradually focuses in on one particular topic, a “white slavery”, rather than a snuff movie, ring.

This paradigmatic shift has an odd effect: On the one hand white slavery sounds distinctly passé for a 1970s film compared to the decidedly contemporairy phenomenon of snuff movies, with this quaintness further foregrounded by the fact that our protagonist isn’t even identified as white. On the other hand a simple change of terminology to “people trafficking” would give it a relevance to today’s tabloids.

Though there are again hardcore inserts, at least in the version under review (DVD distributor Severin has released both R and XXX type versions), there is nothing to compare to the fake but uncomfortably convincing snuff footage of Emanuelle in America.

Likewise while there is one scene which implies bestiality, as a snake is encouraged to explore one would-be prostitute’s vagina and a dog to mount another (shades of the contemporaneous US and French hardcore productions The Devil in Miss Jones and Exhibition perhaps) there is nothing to quite compare to the previous film’s more explicit horse masturbation scene.

Equally, however, the presence of this material also indicates that this is hardly the ideal Emanuelle film with which to introduce a Eurosleaze novice to the filone’s often dubious delights.

This is an impression enhanced by some of the curious intertextualities of the casting: Don Powell, who played Black Emanuelle’s father in the non-Gemser, non-D’Amato entry Black Emanuelle 2 here appears as chauffer and assistant to Ivan Rassimov, a UN official who basically plays what would otherwise be the Gabrielle Tinti role. Brigitte Petronio, who appears as a missionary girl in Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals here plays a dissatisfied Roman member of an Indian guru’s cult. The guru himself is played by none other than George Eastman, who had earlier played the main villain in the D’Amato directed but non-Gemser entry Emanuelle's Revenge. Got all that?!

Put another way it’s the kind of film where you need the familiar strains of Nico Fidenco to sort of tie it all together.

Returning to the porn theme, one thing I hadn’t noticed on previous viewing was that the truck driver in the opening sequence is played by US hardcore performer turned director Paul Thomas.

Emanuelle e le porno notti nel mondo n. 2 / Emanuelle and the Erotic Nights / Emanuelle and the Porno Nights

You could be forgiven for getting confused here: the original Le Notti porno di mondo, also directed and edited by Bruno Mattei under his Jimmy Mathews pseudonym, featured Laura Gemser, but did not reference her Emanuelle character in its title.


Gemser's introductions / linkings have a certain something...

Regardless, the two films are pretty much interchangeable, featuring similar mondo-style supposedly from around the world but predominantly shot in the same Rome studios. Be it the USA, France or Germany the nightclubs and their audiences look the same, with bottles of J&B prominently placed on just about every table.

The first scenes here depicts a séance that segues into a black mass, complete with virgin deflowering in the name of Satan and one of those peculiarly sexless softcore orgy numbers.

Next we get a Parisian magician who specialises in making clothes disappear and doing the rising cloth routine with a detachable erection that may or may not belong to a nude dwarf who then runs through the audience; an adult version of Luna Park, where an on-leave soldier wins a blow-up sex doll and another person of restricted growth is triumphant with a kind of test your strength machine into which the men insert their penises; and a Lady Godiva routine that hints at a beauty and the bestiality scenario with her pony but doesn't go as far as Emanuelle in America nor La Bete.

This is followed by Ajita Wilson, photographing a lesbian sex show and addressing us straight to camera like Gemser; a Japanese penis transplant operation - here a male voice, purportedly that of a professor, is used to provide extra gravitas - and some New Guinea mating rituals of dubious authenticity as far as the virginity testing of the young women goes if not the stock footage of pigs being clubbed to death for a feast.


The usual mondo footage of animals qua meat

Dwarves are again the order of the day for the subsequent segment, a Biancaneve-themed routine, while detachable phalluses feature in the next, featuring a bodybuilder and his fan club of predominantly middle-aged women.


Biancaneve

Things are rounded off with a report from the making of a porn film; a couple of women wrestling in foam; a science-fiction themed dance routine cum strip show; an Italian stripping housewife TV program and footage from a US nudist event.

While all of the material has a certain historical and sociological interest - Is this what passed for shocking entertainment? What was with the fascination with dwarves? - it is this last sequence that is probably the most interesting precisely because of its status as actuality footage, albeit obviously edited by Mattei into something more interesting. The bodies on display aren't merely those of attractive young women, as predominate elsewhere within the film, but are more balanced between the sexes and across the age spectrum, imparting an appropriately grotesque and carnivalesque tone.

Laure / Forever Emanuelle

Another day, another Annie Belle Emmanuelle film.

Aficionados will, however, no doubt note that I use the two M spelling on this occasion.

There is a reason: that Laure / Forever Emmanuelle was scripted and co-directed - albeit anonymously - by the real-life Emmanuelle and / or creator of the character, Emmanuelle Arsan, who also appears on screen, as Myrte, a friend of Belle's character Laure.

This makes, not surprisingly, for an intriguing case as far as theories of auteurism go, of a film which is officially credited to no-one, almost as if being from an unknown source in the manner of a number of erotic / pornographic works, but which clearly otherwise represents Arsan's take on Emmanuelle more than any of the other films bearing her / the character's name.

It's also strange to see Arsan in the flesh. Being of Thai origin, she is if anything more like Laura Gemser than Sylvia Kristel or Belle physically, more Black or Yellow Emanuelle than Emmanuelle. This also tends to put a different slant on the colonialist / exoticist / imperialist / orientalist - delete as applicable - aspects of the franchise, making the whole that bit more cosmopolitan and perhaps allowing for the possibility of challenging the binaries of the exotic and familiar and of orientalist and occidentalist discourses.


Will the 'real' Em(m)anuelle please step forward - Arsan as Myrte

The story in brief is that Laure and Myrte are part of an expedition into a remote area of the Philippines where they, along with Professor Morgan and hippie-type cameraman Nicholas - the inevitable Al Cliver - hope to make contact with a mysterious tribe, the Mara. Nothing so unusual about this, except that the expedition's intentions are more ethnographic than sensation seeking, with none of the usual cannibal ferox subtext or excesses.

Instead the Mara - a significant sounding name if we consider Hindu and Buddhist theology - represent something of the the innocence that has been lost by the westerners and westernised members of the expedition. Specifically, they have an annual rite of rebirth whereby each member of the tribe is reborn to assume a new identity, which they then keep for the next year before the cycle begins again.


The image and the reality - Belle and Cliver make love over his footage of their and others' lovemaking

Indeed, it takes rather a long time for the expedition to get underway, with the first half of the film being more concerned with detailing the erotic exploits of Laure and company and featuring various intellectual digressions that, if not necessarily registering as genuinely profound, indicate an somewhat uncommon level of ambition.

There is also some low humour, as when Laure's assisting the professor with his slideshow of the Mara is short-circuited by the attentions of some of her friends hidden beneath the podium much like Police Academy.

The limit point within the film's discourse of sexual freedom is also apparent. It is, unsurprisingly, male homosexuality While Nicholas indicates that he is not jealous when Laure goes off with another man, on the grounds that he feels whatever she feels and that whatever makes her happy makes him happy, there is never any suggestion that he and the Professor are going to engage with one another sexually in the same ways as Laure, Myrte and the other women do.

The film also features a transgendered character who comments on having chosen her gender. Crucially, however, she is also presented as having a female rather than a male lover in what is either a more challenging instance of queering gender identity or a means of recuperating the character back into the fold, whereby every man wants a woman and every woman a man and / or a woman.

Actually co-directed by Arsan along with Ovidio Assonitis, the film is well enough put together, with good use of locations; a pleasing Nico Fidenco meets Pierre Bachelet score courtesy of Franco Micalizzi, and some nice self-referential touches.

A potential double-bill candidate for screening with Marguerite Duras's India Song?

La Fine dell'innocenza / The End of Innocence / Blue Belle / Emanuelle's Daughter Blue Belle

There are, I think, at least two ways of reading Blue Belle / La Fine dell'innocenza.

The first, suggested by the Oriental setting and Annie Belle's appearances in Forever Emanuelle and Black Emanuelle, White Emanuelle - the later opposite Laura Gemser - is as Em(m)anuelle junior.

The second, suggested by Harry Alan Tower's involvement in the production, along with the presence of his wife/partner Maria Rohm in the cast, is as a more Sadean exercise along the lines of Jess Franco's Eugenie and Justine, being about the initiation of a naïve young woman into the workings of the real world.


La bellissima Belle

Whatever the case, director Massimo Dallamano was a good choice to help a stranger to such material, with his Sacher-Masoch adaptation Venus in Furs and schoolgirls in peril gialli What Have You Done to Solange? and What Have You Done to Your Daughters?, demonstrating a facility for taking what could have merely been sleaze seriously.


A messy close up of someone eating, recalling Dallamano's background as spaghetti western cinematographer

The story, significantly co-authored by Belle, begins with her guardian Michael arriving at the convent school to take her character, confusingly also called Annie Belle in apparent reference to Emmanuelle Arsan's eponymous, semi-autobiographical heroine, away with him.

He gives her a new outfit, which she changes into in the back of the Rolls Royce as a passing cyclist keeps pace with the car and, presumably much like the implied male spectator, enjoys the show.

Already, however, there is also a split evident: if the cyclist knows nothing of the couple and their relationship and plays no further part in the proceedings, we are likely to already more than a little disconcerted by the film-makers' declining to spell out the exact details of Michael and Belle's relationship with one another nor offer the expected explicit condemnation of his borderline incestuous cum Humbert Humbert tendencies.

Nor do things become much clearer after the action shifts to Hong Kong. Michael introduces Belle to his idle rich expatriate associates, before then being arrested on - admittedly well-founded - suspicion of currency smuggling. Left on her own, Laure is forced to make her own way in this demi-monde.


Intertextuality, 70s style

What follows is very much the usual stuff: copious nudity; some intentional humour, much of it revolving Al Cliver's collection of erotic curious and the reactions of more respectable old-timers to them (Cliver's presence feels very much of the cast-one, get-one-free variety, as also seen with the Gemser-Gabriele Tinti pairing in the Black Emanuelle films) ; extensive travelogue and quasi-documentary shooting, including sequences at a Buddhist temple where nun Ines Pellegrini delivers some pat Eastern wisdoms; various softcore lesbian and heterosexual numbers and, most problematic of all, a no-becomes-yes rape scene in which Belle loses her hitherto surprisingly retained virginity at the hands of her new mentor and confidant Linda's lover, Angelo. (Angelo's identity is revealed by the giallo-esque image of his distinctive ring, which Belle recognises in the resulting flashback.) In the end, however, Belle emerges triumphant, a new woman ready to face the world and whatever it can throw at her.




The female gaze, objectifying the male body?

Dallamano's backround as a cinematographer is in evidence in the way he directs, with a particular emphasis on shots that position us distanced from the action through some sort of barrier - a window frame, a piece of ironwork, a fence etc. - or with one character looking in on another.

The importance of voyeurism is further confirmed by several observational moments within the film, with telescopes, binoculars or through a keyhole. While for the most part these present men observing women, they are not exclusively about the "male gaze," with the keyhole scene in fact showing two women objectifying a man. In addition, another scene presents one character listening in, via a discreetly off the hook telephone, to two others making love, indicating a different, aural rather than visual regime and dynamic at work.


Whatever...

Given the film's exotic and Orientalist themes, it is perhaps also worth mentioning that the dominance of the visual over the other senses is arguably less a universal than a product of western culture at a particular point in its development and that, as such, psychoanalytic notions that tend to be derived from the experience of these selfsame cultures may also be less generalisable than their proponents have often recognised. Though there is nothing new in this, with it quickly being recognised that Laura Mulvey's ideas here, for instance, very much assumed a white, middle class, heterosexual position, it is I think also worth reiterating.

Another interrelated issue here is that of consciousness and false consciousness: What do we say and do when the female spectator identifies with the 'wrong' subject position, as defined by the theorist and their theory? How does the theorist square a concern for women's own, supposedly authentic voice and experience, when it does not echo her own? What does the theoriest say when someone who is 'objectively' oppressed by patriarchy, capitalism and/or colonialism subjectively refuses to acknowledge this oppression?

Though such issues may seem navel gazing, the point is that they cut to the heart of exploitation cinema itself. Indeed, Blue Belle brings them closer to the fore than most exploitation films because of the multiple roles played by Belle. While it is difficult to say how far the film reflects her own thoughts on gender relations and coming of age, especially given that the actual writing of the screenplay also included contributions from Dallamano and Towers, the confused messages that emerge are nothing if not challenging.

Who was behind the oh so 1970s "porno rape" scene? Who detailed the reactions of Belle and those around her to her violation? Were these understood as representations of fantasy or of reality? If rape is undoubtedly abhorrent, does this mean that rape fantasies are necessarily bad, as per the old 'pornography is theory, rape is practice' line? Unsurprisingly I don't pretend to have any answers here - indeed, I think such questions are basically unanswerable. But again it is the fact that a basically unpretentious exploitation film that is provoking me to think about them and, hopefully, you to respond.

Like its models and the mondo, with its equivalent scenes of the exotic, unusual and perverse, the film's narrative approach is decidedly episodic, with individual scenes and sequences that often exist in and for themselves as much as a part of the larger whole: After the opening sequence has introduced Belle with medium-length brown hair the next scene, set in the Alps, sees her with her more familiar bleach-blonde pixie crop.

Another, decidedly what-the-hell moment, sees Belle being attacked by a group of robbers and rescued by the timely interventions of a martial artist as if in a Bruce Lee film. This is, however, then retrospectively revealed as being a scene from the making of a film within a film. If the inclusion of such material is incongruous, it also serves to further highlight the interconnections between world popular cinemas - think also here of the Ford / Kurosawa / Leone triangle, of Yojimbo and A Fistful of Dollars - and their willingness to borrow from one another's traditions in search of new attractions to present to their sensation-hungry audiences.

A similar hybridity is evident in Bixio-Frizzi-Tempera's scoring in which the acoustic guitar and female vocal led ballad predominant in the early European sequences, is contrasted with sitar - admittedly not the most obvious Chinese instrument - in some of the Hong Kong sequences before these two themes are eventually reconciled and combined in the penultimate scene.

Emanuelle e gli ultimi cannibali / Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals / Emanuelle's Cannibal Adventure / Trap them and Kill Them

Whilst working undercover, posing as a patient in a mental hospital, Emanuelle (Laura Gemser) is understandably shocked by the sight of a nurse running screaming into the corridor, blood gushing from where her right breast used to be.


Yeah, and Marlboro-smoking chimpanees might fly out my butt...

Investigating further, Emanuelle discovers that the nurse, whose habit of making unwanted lesbian advances towards her patients seemingly precludes much in the way of sympathy, was tending to an unidentified and mute patient who had been found in the Amazon rainforest.

Even more intriguing is the distinctive tattoo above the young woman's pubic region – a placement which naturally also allows for the a convenient bit of full-frontal female nudity – identified as the mark of a cannibal tribe believe to be extinct for the past half-century.


This time round Emanuelle conceals her camera in a giallo-style doll


D'Amato regular Dirce Funari appears as the white cannibal girl

Convicing her editor that this could be the scoop of the century, presumably thus trumping her earlier exposes of white slavers and snuff film producers, the ace reporter seeks out the assistance of Professor Mark Lester (Gabriele Tinti), an expert on the subject of cannibalism, to mount an expedition into the Amazon.






A touch of the old mondo snuff footage as two African adulterers are punished for their sexual transgression

Arriving, Mark and Emauelle rendezvous with an old friend of the anthropologists, Wilkes (Geoffrey Coplestone) who knows the area and its tribes well. Though unable to accompany them, his daughter Isabelle (Monica Zanchi) and her tutor Sister Angela (Annamaria Clementi), whose convent lies upriver, join the expedition along with a couple of guides, Felipe and Manolo; that night Isabelle watches Emanuelle and Mark as they make love and masturbates, while later the two women wash each other in the river.

As the party pulls ashore to make camp for the night Emanuelle is attacked by a snake and is saved by the timely intervention of Donald McKenzie (Donal O'Brien), who invites them to join him at his camp inland, along with his wife Maggie (Susan Scott / Nieves Navarro) and their guide Salvatore (Percy Hogan).

Donald explains that he is on a hunting expedition but also proves to be a voyeur, looking in on Sister Angela and Isabelle as they sleep, half-naked. Meanwhile Maggie and Salvatore go off into the undergrowth for a tryst.

All the while none of the group notices none of the group notices that they are being watched from the undergrowth by the waiting cannibals...

The next morning one of the guides goes missing while the party's boats prove to have been cut loose from their moorings. Continuing on foot, they then discover the remains of one of the nuns from the convent...

One things about the cannibal filone which I'd never really thought about until watching Emanuelle and the Last Cannibals again was its unusual production pattern. Though enough films with cannibal themes were certainly made in the ten year period between 1972 and 1981 there doesn't seem to be any obvious rise and fall to their production, with a fairly steady flow of productions from the same few directors – Lenzi, Deodato, D'Amato – instead and only the occasional opportunistic interloper on the territory, most notably Sergio Martino with the at-times not dissimilar Mountain of the Cannibal God.

Seen in retrospect the thing that distinguishes D'Amato's forays into the filone, whether through the character of Emanuelle Nera as here or in his other pornotropic ventures without the character such as Papaya Love Goddess of the Caribbean and Orgasmo Nero, is his emphasis upon sex over violence and gore.


Is it just me or did anyone else half expect to see Captain Hagerty's zombie surfacing behind them here?

Thus, in addition to all the sexploitation material outlined above, the opening New York also sequences present Emanuelle fantasising about making love to Lester and saying farewell to her current boyfriend in her own special way, presumably for anyone in the audience who felt that only one display of Gemser's naked form every five minutes wasn't enough already.

This said, once the cannibals finally make an appearance in the final half-hour the nastiness quotient does increas significantly and, moreover, should not disappoint the horror audience – excepting those who are regrettably sufficiently jaded to need their random animal killings – with D'Amato also handling the shock moments well, using rapid cuts, zooms and stinger sounds to augment their effectiveness whilst also conveying something of the subjective experience of the characters.






Some of the gore

In his analysis of the Black Emanuelle films, Xavier Mendik suggests that they existed primarily to allow Italian audiences to see Emanuelle degraded and objectified on account of her monstrous non-whiteness. While a sophisticated theoretical analysis, it arguably downplays the extent to which the character is displayed as desirable – surely the main reason for the success of the franchise – and the way that the white / non-white boundaries are more complex than a simple attraction / repulsion dynamic would allow for.


Can we honestly say one of these women is presented as desirable and the other as monstrous?

It's hard to square the sheer popularity of the Emanuelle series and character with the idea that Italian audiences went to see these films primarily out of a perverse, sadistic desire to see Gemser and the other non-white characters humiliated, degraded and generally 'put in their place'.

Nevermind that Gemser's character is presented as a model of sexually liberated, desirable womanhood or that D'Amato seems to have regarded the actress with far greater respect than many of white Italian actresses he also worked with for her straightforwardness, professionalism and refusal to do hardcore material.

Indeed, if anything I would argue that a film like the actioner Tough to Kill, in which Percy Hogan's comedy negro Wabu evenually turns the tables on all the whites – nominal pretty boy hero Luc Merenda included – who have regarded him with outright contempt or benign indifference throughout, comes closer to being a joke at the expense of the white racist who has laughed along with them and at Wabu than anything else.

Though there's nothing quite so pronounced here, we do have Mackenzie's critique of African safaris of the sort represented in Africa Addio, as safe, predictable and inauthentic, as he stresses that knowing that there is genuine danger, that the hunter can become the hunted, is fundamental to the real experience.

Another interesting scene is that in which Maggie gazes on Salvatore and his phallic weapon whilst masturbating, before instructing him to come with her into the undergrowth for that one-on-one encounter. Salvatore is presented as being able to fulfil Maggie's needs in a way that her impotent husband cannot, without there being any obvious racist element to their mutual lovemaking scene. Though we might certainly question if Salvatore is really in a position to refuse Maggie's demands, there's no indication that she is out to humiliate him by playing slave mistress Mandingo type games.




Which of these female and male desiring gazes is barred?

Nor is either lover really punished for the act, such that is cannot be understood as any more transgressive than anything else on show for our delectation – with the notable exception of McKenzie's decidedly non-consensual mauling of Isabelle.

Basically, in D'Amato's pre-AIDS world the message seems to be that anything goes – except perhaps male homosexual activity, as the one type that still retained that element of “monstrousness” even in the work of more avowedly progressive directors – just so long as no-one gets hurt.

Likewise the very fact of having a white middle bourgeois woman as the active bearer of the gaze against an objectified black proletarian man here again challenges classical formulations of this theory and exposes some of their own unspoken assumptions and blind-spots. ('Let she who is without sin cast the first stone,' as it were.)

Though D'Amato's depiction of the cannibals themselves can no doubt be criticised from an ethnographic or anthropological perspective – as can the factual error of having an African chimpanzee in a supposedly South American rainforest – to do so omits the film's exploitation nature and that it is first an foremost a fiction intended to entertain.

It also arguably implies that the vast majority of fiction films should be likewise criticised for their factual inaccuracies or liberty taking or else the imposition of a double standard whereby excuses are conveniently found and made for those films whose politics and representations the critic agrees with. (Where are relativism and respect for the ways of the other here; does an “obvious” cinema also suggest that we would be better using obvious empirical material rather than theoretical sophistry to make sense of what it offers its implied audience it in the first instance?)

The acting, with all the members of the cast D'Amato regulars, is acceptable and in some cases – Navarro, O'Brien better than might be expected – the dubbing relatively poor and Nico Fidenco's engagingly trashy music present and correct.

Enough said, really...

Die Todesgöttin des Liebescamps / Love Camp

Okay, I know: this isn’t an Italian film. Rather it’s a West German/Greece co-production. But I felt it was worth writing about anyway for two reasons.

First, it could be construed as a borderline Black Emanuelle entry on account of having Laura Gemser and Gabriele Tinti up to their usual tricks.

Second, it’s just so amazingly bad that it’s worth an hour and a half of any Euro trash or cult fan’s time. We’re talking – in line with the film’s milieu and themes – transcendentally awful.

Gemser plays the leader of a vaguely Jim Jones /Children of God styled love cult (and as such the film might form a nice companion piece with Lenzi’s Eaten Alive, if the Italian trash fan needs any other reason for watching it) who takes full material advantage of her gullible young hippie followers.

The rules of the cult are simple: no exclusive relationships; everyone can have sex with everyone else; is expected to hook and recruit for the cult, and is apparently free to leave of their own free will whenever they like.

In fact, however, we soon learn that Gemser will brook no refusals and has her muscle-bound bodyguard and henchman Tanga covertly dispose of any apostates by throwing them down a crevasse.

A visiting US senator’s daughter comes to the attention of Gemser through her chief recruiter, Dorian, played by the film’s writer, director and composer Christian Anders.

Will true love win out, or will a tragedy ensue?

Really, who cares.

It’s all an excuse to showcase lots of nudity; some softcore heterosexual and lesbian fumblings; the odd bit of violence and sadism; some truly atrocious disco tunes and Hair-style production numbers; some free your booty and your mind will follow cod philosophising; a bit of ludicrous kung fu (courtesy of Anders, who also made similarly (non-)sterling contributions to the even more ludicrous sounding Kung Fu Emanuelle) and – most amusing of all – Tanga, permanently oiled and tensed up and looking as if he’s wandered off the set of a peplum.

Sometimes a picture is worth a thousand words, so in lieu of any more commentary here’s a few:


Christian Anders, whose fault it all is...


One of the camp followers, playing air guitar; his buddy looks like Tony Levin from King Crimson but unfortunately doesn't play air stick...


Tanga


And more Tanga...


Gemser thankfully spends more time out of costumes than in them...

Emanuelle Around the World derive

This morning I settled down to watch the XXX version of Joe D'amato's Emanuelle - perché violenza alle donne? / Emanuelle Around the World, only to find myself drifting away from the film part of the way through.

It was nothing to do with a dissatisfaction with the film: using the familiar travelogue format, as the roving reporter finds herself going from continent to continent in search of a scoop and busting a woman-trafficking ring in the process, it offers the usual pleasures like familiar cult faces (and bodies), situations and music, all coupled with "exotic" locales and expectably-unexpected moments, be it George Eastman's turn as an Indian guru or the various sometimes literal what-the-fuck encounters.

Rather, it was that the film increasingly got me thinking about the wider phenomenon of cult yet again and, more specifically, about the different approaches we take to it as consumers and producers of discourses around such texts. (Yes, it's double domed deconstructionist time; with apologies to Joe Carducci...)

The first thing here is the challenge a film like Emanuelle Around the World poses in terms of the sometimes cherished notion of authenticity. For while D'Amato frequently voices a personal preference for softcore over hardcore material in interviews, he would then typically go on to say that he was also aware of the harsh realities of the market. Thus, whereas we can take films such as The Slasher is a Sex Maniac or 99 Women and say with some confidence what constituted the director's original version or vision and that hardcore inserts were not a part of it, here we perhaps cannot.

Indeed, part of my own pleasure in watching the film – thinking about it also made me re-view it – in not having yet seen the alternative edit in the Black Emanuelle box set (give it time...) comes from making educated guesses at what point the alternative footage gets cut in or out and Gemser herself left the scene.

The second thing, but also perhaps intertwined with the first to some degree, is the way in which films like these help expose some of the fault lines in cult film discussion more generally. I'm thinking here of something like Video Watchdog and what its remit as "the perfectionist's guide to fantastic video" actually means, or the Mobius Home Video forums and their policy over what it's acceptable to discuss, worth quoting for both referring to D'Amato and attempting to situating him in a particular generic context:

While discussion of mainstream-oriented unrated or X-rated films that may feature sexually explicit material is okay, discussion of adult XXX-rated films and DVDs (including vintage "blue" films) and their cast and crew is outside the scope of MHVF. Rare exceptions may be made for the discussion of XXX films legitimately connected to cast or crew primarily known for their mainstream work (e.g., the films of Joe D'Amato, Radley Metzger, Abel Ferrara, etc.), or cult films such as CAFE FLESH. We're interested in keeping MHVF open to underage readers as much as possible, and allowing the discussion of XXX-rated films would impede that goal. MHVF also doesn't have the necessary legal disclosures and warnings to alert parents or concerned readers to the presence of discussion topics about XXX-rated films.

(Annoyingly the URL of the specific post / page is masked, making it harder to cite in the appropriate fashion; it's on the posting policy and FAQ page.)

While it is true that this film isn't strictly speaking a fantasy one and, more generally, that the notion of fantastical cinema is itself a slippery one - e.g. the anglophone definition of fantasy versus the francophone fantastique - one does sometimes get the feeling that the boundaries are sometimes somewhat inchoate and ad-hoc. When is the sexual content of a horror or fantasy film - again note the possible conflation /confusion – such that it is “really” a sex film? (The reaction of some critics to the opening sequences of Cronenberg's Crash comes to mind.) At what point does a Metzger or D'Amato cease being a “mainstream” director? What does “mainstream” mean in the cult context - is it simply a coded “not porn”?

Perhaps Jean Rollin's Phantasmes was just a porn film that its director effectively disowned, his use of a pseudonym a way of signifying that it was not a Rollin film, as Tohill and Tombs note, but what about much of Jess Franco's oeuvre in this regard, not to mention his own remark in one his Obsession interview to the effect that porn is just another genre?

Or maybe it is that there is sometimes too much of emphasis upon the auteur as source of meaning – if Rollin says this is not a true Rollin film, then that is it, case closed - or upon empirical detail – X seconds of footage are different Y into the film - as against what this difference might mean, within cult discourse.

The crucial word here is might, the issue that of taking on board a more interpretive approach whilst avoiding the pitfall of academic approaches that become so detached from the film - or worse, fail to engage with it in the first place - and simply disappear up their own arguments.

The task, I would argue, is to bring the two approaches into closer contact with one another, hopefully allowing for a kind of contagion so that the cult and fan types become infected with theory and academic and theoretical types with supporting their claims via more empirical evidence.

One piece that's came to mind in regard to this film specifically is Xavier Mendik's Black Sex, Bad Sex: Monstrous Ethnicity in the Black Emanuelle Films in the edited collection Alternative Europe. Examining the cycle as a whole, Mendik argues that they express an Italian unease at the racial Other, such that Laura Gemser is a fundamentally monstrous figure. It's not an argument I would necessarily agree with wholeheartedly - I think there's too much of the sadistic male colonising gaze in there and insufficient scope for irony or self-parody - but at least Mendik attempts to engage with the significance of what he sees, rather than simply providing an itemisation of factual detail.

And all that, I guess, is a rambling attempt to justify my own interest in taking a phenomenological approach to Argento, that it is – hopefully – a theoretical approach that allows one to move from the experience of the film / text to a reflection on the meanings of that experience and text while being true(r) to them than the alternatives I've looked at. (Well, that and I don't think anyone else has done it yet...)